Museum of Konstantin Sutyagin and Alexander Shevchenko

(Photo: Evgeny Gabrielev )

Exhibition hall "Ark". Moscow

The artists Sutyagin and Shevchenko are convinced retrograde easel painters, that is, painters and graphic artists who go to sketches, draw cute “French” landscapes and still lifes. At the same time, these people are quite advanced, have heard a lot about contemporary art, and even for some reason entered (unsuccessfully) into the course “New Artistic Strategies”, organized for aspiring artists by the Institute of Contemporary Art together with the Soros Center for Contemporary Art. In addition, at the end of last year, Sutyagin published a large and excellently written article for an artist (I even passed my subway station, engrossed in reading it) in the fashionable intelligentsia magazine “Inviolable Reserve”. From which it turns out that the author knows the French philosophers Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, read two books by the scandalous Alexander Brener and respected him very much, loves the obscene poetry of Miroslav Nemirov, popular in avant-garde circles, a friend of the even more scandalous Avdey Ter-Oganyan, and - most importantly - reads the magazine "Itogi". It is clear that Sutyagin and Shevchenko are aware of the sad fate of painting in the 20th century.

Therefore, at first glance, it is an immodest idea of ​​very living artists to create a museum of themselves (even if for less than a month, but in an exhibition hall dealing mainly with “museum” art of the 20s - 50s, and within the framework of the “Ark” memorial cycle “Unforgotten Names” ") is actually meek and humble. This is not narcissism, but capitulation to the aesthetics of time. “The only territory where painting today is still preserved as art is the museum,” Sutyagin rightly notes in the mentioned article from NZ. And he continues: “The artist A. Shevchenko and I figured out how we and all today’s painters can be saved today. We simply need to move into the past, at least for fifty years. To museums.”
They moved quite convincingly. “Kovcheg” interspersed retro pictures of Sutyagin and Shevchenko with works by artists from the 20s to the 40s, mainly from the group “13”, which was destroyed in 1931 for “bourgeois formalism”. In addition, paintings, graphics and personal belongings of artists - a museum is a museum - are diluted with an antique photo series “Alien Dream” by Evgeny Gabrielev, in which Sutyagin and Shevchenko really turned into bohemian characters of the early 30s (see photo). The main “museum curation” joke is that visitors must wear slippers. (They say that after the opening day, three people left wearing them.)

As a result, the exhibition came out stylish, ironic and conceptual. “Smart,” as Sutyagin, a supporter of stupid and sensual art, would curse. Who - like Shevchenko - is still smarter than he wants to seem.